100,000th First
I’m starting this off not knowing where exactly it is going but I want to keep this to a 5 minute read. I’m naming this my 100,000th first because I have most likely done 100,000 things for the first time in my life but this one ranks pretty high up the list when I rank according to how good it has made me feel.
I started Machine Learning about 3 months ago and I was learning it by myself with online resources and the help of the AI Saturday community in Lagos. I found out about the Inter campus ML competition hosted by Data Science Nigeria (DSN). I worked really hard to fulfill the requirements set by DSN to get into the Data Science and Machine Learning boot camp. We were put on an introductory Machine Leaning track for eight weeks plus, a Kaggle competition and a video interview. Eventually I made it and was part of the top 75 to partake in the boot camp. The hackathon was the icing on the cake
I found out some of my friends had also made it into the boot camp. The joy of getting in diminished after the realization I was 32nd on the ranking to get into the competition. That meant there were at least 31 people better than I was. I took it as a challenge and call to improve my skills. I put in the work and was eagerly looking towards the competition.
The day came and we attended a conference on Artificial Intelligence for Financial Inclusion Summit before going into the boot camp.
The schedule for us was intensive, to put it light. I was determined not to waste this opportunity. We had industry professionals from InstaDeep, Argility, General Electric(GE), IxioAnalytics, FCMB, Cortex Logic, Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa, Ripple VC, Github, Google, Teragon Group, Microsoft, AXA Mansard, Octave Analytics and so many other companies speak to us on the different ways we can apply this new career path we have chosen.
The hackathon kicked off and it was hosted on Zindi. Zindi is supposed to be a Kaggle for Africa. A platform to host and solve Africa’s problems.
The problem was a financial inclusion one where we were to classify if an individual would pay back a loan or not. This was a problem for One Fi, one of the sponsors of the program.
It was a hard 4 days balancing going for the sessions during the day and coding through the night but i was able to do it and apply all the knowledge I had on the topic. This was my first hackathon and I quickly understood the importance of being able to search for the right things on google. I was stuck a lot of times but I also learnt the effect a little rest can have. I was able to multi task efficiently due to some time management skills i had picked up over time. At the end of the hackathon, results were finalized and I had the 4th highest score out of the 75 finalists in Nigeria.
During this bootcamp, I grew immensely in my machine learning journey. After the hackathon, I was already able to apply ML methods to my own problems. So, even though I didn't win, it was an excellent opportunity for me.
This was my first hackathon and will not be the last hackathon I will be part of. I got an internship opportunity from this and this is just me getting started in my ML journey.
You can find my slightly cleaned up code from the winners here and the files for it here.
Big big shout out to my brother and mentor in the game Ogundipe Ore. He inspired me to write this. Make sure to check his stuff out.
